Tuesday, March 16, 2010

I’ve played over 60 hours on my medic in Global Agenda now, almost exclusively PvPing. Here are some tips and tricks for being an effective medic in PvP.

As a healing medic, you should prioritize targets to heal in two ways: heal good players before bad players. Heal other healing medics first, then assaults, robotics, and recons in that order. Don’t heal a bad assault instead of a good recon, though—keep your eyes open for good players and help them turn the tide by keeping them alive as long as possible.

Remember that healing has a multiplicative effect on team ability. The better you heal a good player, the better he’ll play: he can be in battle for a much higher percentage of the match because he doesn’t have to withdraw when low on health or wait to respawn. A better player will be more useful each second he’s alive than a bad player.

Pre-Game

When you first get into a PvP match, run a /who on each assault and check their star rating. You should stick to the ones that are higher-rated, because they’ve proven that they improve their team’s chances of winning the most. Most of the time, a high-rated player will contribute more—you can push your team over the top by keeping him alive where otherwise he’d be dead.

Just because you’re a healer doesn’t mean you can’t bring along poison wave or poison aura! A great healer adapts to the situation. If they don’t have many medics, well placed poisons can turn the tide of the battle. Change your offhands during the match, if necessary, to maximize your effectiveness. On Scramble and Payload missions, one poison off-hand can make a huge impact because players will tend to cluster around the objective.

Heal Well

Use obstacles to block opponents from firing at you as you heal teammates. The less damage you take, the better job you’re doing healing your target. A dead medic can heal no-one. Use terrain to your advantage to avoid enemy fire. Sit lower on a hill than your assault buddy so you aren’t exposed. Heal them from behind a wall. Find a crate that you can crouch behind and heal friendlies without being hit by fire from the other side.

Use your offhands to pile on burst healing when a friendly (or multiple) takes severe and sudden damage. Last night I was running PvP with a full group of high-skill players—I was using a three-wave offhand build, with frenzy wave, healing wave, and power wave at my disposal. I could pile on 1300 burst healing in a matter of seconds, along with my right-click heal doing 242ish per tick. I’ve saved many teammates by launching all my waves in the middle of a big fight—power wave and frenzy wave can, when coupled, especially lead to a fight shifting into my team’s favor.

Don’t waste your time healing players who are full on health unless you’re trying to regain health using the biofeedback beam. Keep as many people alive as possible.

The right-click heal on biofeedback and boost beams does double healing, but it’s much more expensive in power. Use the right-click heal often, but don’t overheal with it. Pay attention to your target’s health and stop healing with right-click as soon as he’s topped off.

If you begin taking sustained damage, use your jetpack to hop around erratically until your enemy switches targets. Go back to healing your friends once the heat is off.

Never let a bomb recon’s bombs hit you. Taking their damage can easily kill you. EMP bombs can disable you and lead to your team being pushed off an objective. Dodge bombs and grenades as much as possible—your teammates sometimes cannot do so because they’re busy capturing an objective or finishing off an enemy, but it’s your duty to keep them alive after the bombs go off. You probably won’t stay alive for long if you eat bomb damage.

Fight Back

Is a recon harassing you, but getting away using his stealth whenever teammates apply pressure? DoT him. Hit him with your agonizer, a poison or powervirus grenade, or a poison wave. While the DoT is in effect, he cannot effectively cloak.

Use your melee weapon. If you need to deal damage, your melee weapon is your best bet. Not only does swinging away with your poison injector do more damage than most ranged weapons, you also recharge power while you’re doing it. For this reason you may want to prefer melee to ranged combat if you need to fight.

Take out undefended turrets. Do whatever you need to do to help your team. Is a turret harassing your teammates while another healer is nearby? Get behind the turret and kill it. Preventing damage is as good as healing it.

1 comment:

Logan
said...

great tips... i don't really have anything to add... this is pretty much exactly how i play.

too bad my medic has just been collecting dust lately... SC2 is eating up all my spare time... and my not so spare time...

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